The Present Is Not Dead

There’s a stimulating new movie-centric Web site to visit, N1FR, the film supplement of n+1. Its launch issue features high-quality writing that, nonetheless, occasionally advances dubious views—a problem that has vexed the American movie scene since the early ‘sixties, when Andrew Sarris, with his efficient but often merely practical prose, significantly advanced the appreciation of the art of the cinema, while his views were aggressively challenged by the stylish wit of Pauline Kael, who often elegantly derided many of the best movies of the day. Of course, doing nothing but asserting that a movie is good doesn’t make it so; but neither does saying so with style. Sometimes the most important thing a critic can do is point—and Sarris, in his heyday, was a pointer of genius, while Kael was an often unreliable one.

I got into a little Twitter-tussle with Christian Lorentzen last week over his article there, “Dicking Around,” a dismissal of Judd Apatow’s work, in which this very intelligent, lively, and perceptive critic expects intelligence in movies to appear like his own—refined, elegant, witty, and learned—and displays little imaginative sympathy for an artist whose subject is practical intelligence and mass media. Lorentzen dismisses this most soulful and self-revealing of modern tummlers—and one who, for all that, keeps a clear ethical perspective on what might be called Hollywood morality, and presents characters who, in their blundering way, are evolving in the direction of what the physician in Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” called a mensch. I’m reminded of a fundamental division in American culture between the literary and the cinematic, as seen in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contempt for Joseph L. Mankiewicz. I’m also reminded of the condescending dismissals that Jerry Lewis has long endured. It’s as if the very virtues that are the writers’ raison d’être are being challenged by the filmmakers, who thus incur the writers’ wrath.

But—speaking of Jerry Lewis—the deepest and strangest of the supplement’s articles is the lead one, by Chris Fujiwara, whose recent book on Jerry Lewis is essential both for its great interview with the filmmaker and its meticulous look at the films. The piece, “To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema,” is, among other things, an exemplary manifesto of the age of home video—namely, the a priori prejudice in favor of classics over new releases. Yet, underlying the prejudice, there’s a deep and serious idea that repays attention.

Fujiwara’s blanket opinionizing threatens to overwhelm his ideas: for instance, he dismisses journalism on the grounds that “it gives a license to live through fully, to the end, the conditions of late capitalism, conditions that for most of the rest of humanity are distresses to be endured, but which the journalist faces with the intoxicating satisfaction of having helped perpetuate them.” (He overlooks the many journalists who face these conditions with the sobering satisfaction of helping to reveal, criticize, and ameliorate them.) He dismisses modern Hollywood cinema “with its endless remakes, sequels, sequels to remakes, and remakes of sequels, its grand-scale repetition-compulsion machine,” then complains of the fragmentation of the movie market—in particular, that of “art film”—that renders it “pulverized, privatized, and personalized.” In other words, he dismisses all the movies that are widely distributed, and complains that all the movies he loves aren’t distributed widely enough to get the attention he thinks they deserve—or to influence culture at large. In so doing, Fujiwara seems dialectically bound to the logic of studio flacks who equate cultural importance with commercial importance—when, in fact, it is precisely the critic’s role to influence the culture in the direction of uncoupling the artistic from the commercial.

But the heart of Fujiwara’s argument—and his truly trenchant insight—emerges from his gloss on Susan Sontag’s 1996 article “The Decay of Cinema”:

As defined by Antonioni, Godard, and Bergman, the cinema of the period Sontag eulogized was truly contemporary: its key works, made by artists who were nothing if not interested in defining their own time, were screened in theaters around the world and generally acknowledged as significant.

These are two different arguments; the one about movies “generally acknowledged as significant” again suggests his unfortunate deference to big numbers (general acknowledgment, whether deserved or not, wasn’t then and isn’t now enough to make movies truly and enduringly significant). The other argument, however, is worth considering, and is, I think, the heart of the piece: that the best directors of the ‘sixties had a self-conscious relationship to the power of the cinema to document the crucial ideas and phenomena of the day and, in so doing, to take its place among them. And it’s true that this discovery is one of the key aspects of the great films of the era, and is, in part, constitutive of the reflexiveness that quickly became a Heisenbergian aesthetic commonplace: by filming the world, the movies both documented it and influenced it. Yet the notion—even in its eruptively originary form, as in the films of Godard, Antonioni, and Bergman—arose from the unstable energy of two vectors that pulled in opposite directions:

The first leads from a narrow and skewed definition of the world (one that was Euro-Americano-centric, thus clearly delimited) toward a wide, vast, literally global one (therefore defying easy synopsis, equation, or encapsulation).

The second leads from a reflexive sense of history at large to a more precise, forthright, and self-questioning reflection of the standpoint of the filmmaker—the move from a cinema that assumes the historical stage to one that is truly local and uninhibitedly, directly personal.

Examples of the first kind of cinema are the films of Tsai Ming-liang and Jia Zhangke; of the second, Philippe Garrel and Hong Sang-soo. If Abbas Kiarostami is a giant among his generation of filmmakers, it is, in part, because his films reflect the tensions of these two opposing (though not contradictory) tendencies. The best filmmakers of today acknowledge the world’s diversity and make their claims to universality (as, say, for freedom and desire) carefully and precisely, or depict themselves and their circumstances with audacious, vulnerable intimacy. In so doing, they recognize and reflect the changing modes of cinematic art, politics, methods, business, and culture—and if they do so in a way that often seems more modest, more circumspect, or more local than those of their artistic forebears, it’s because they have reflected on those works and perceived their limitations and implications (and those of their era).

Fujiwara invents criteria that justify the rejection of the recent without regard to the recent works themselves; he resembles a literary critic who decided to stop reviewing new books because none of them reminded him of Tolstoy. The rectitude of a critic who rejects the new is hardly different from the vanity of those who are utterly dismissive or ignorant of the past. The big difference between the past and the present is that the past arrives with a map, whether that of personal memory or legend; the critic who pays attention to the present helps to extend the map. The library is a great thing, but many of its greatest wares began in the bookstore, and its ongoing greatness depends to a significant extent on its continued growth thanks to new arrivals via the bookstore. The same is true of the cinema and its mailbox Alexandria of the DVD.